Military

DATE=4/10/02

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=MULLER TERRORISTS

NUMBER=3-125

BYLINE=TOM CROSBY

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

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INTRO: Attorney General John Ashcroft has announced indictments against four people who have been charged with providing support to an Egyptian-based terrorist organization. Mr. Ashcroft said the group is accused of providing support to the terrorist organization known as the "Islamic Group." The Attorney General said the indictment accuses the defendants of supporting the organization by passing messages regarding Islamic Group activities to and from imprisoned Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. The blind Muslim cleric was sentenced to life in jail for a conspiracy that included 1993's bombing of New York's World Trade Center and plans to blow up several other New York landmarks, including the United Nations.

Legal analyst Eric Muller has studied the indictments and tells V-O-A News Now's Tom Crosby, from a legal standpoint, this is a "fascinating case":

MR. MULLER: The theory of the case is that during a time period after the Sheik's incarceration, after his conviction for conspiracy in 1995, a group of people, including his own lawyer, contrary to prison regulations and the Sheik's own sentence, continued to have contact with him and relay messages to him and from him to other members of his organization, the Islamic Group. And so the government today has brought charges against a man on the outside by the name of Sattar, and then an interpreter actually, who was actually interpreting some of these messages, and, interestingly, the lawyer herself, the woman who represented him in his 1995 trial and who continued to represent him afterwards.

MR. CROSBY: But his lawyer cannot be barred from visiting him, can she? I mean, it is an attorney-client relationship.

MR. MULLER: She cannot be barred from visiting him, but of course she can be barred from engaging in further assistance of further criminality. And the fact is that once a person goes to jail - that is, after they have been convicted - their due process rights and other constitutional rights are somewhat diminished, for security reasons and reasons of public safety. And so certainly a person has the right to contact and discuss legal matters with their attorney, but that would not extend to a right to engage in further planning of terrorist activity, or discussion with people about possible illegal activity - it does not even need to be terrorist activity.

So there is a line here that the government is trying to walk. Certainly the defendants' defense will focus, in large measure, on attorney-client privilege - at least the attorney's defense will. And I think that, in some respects, the Justice Department is moving out into some somewhat uncharted territory, I would say here, where the First Amendment free expression rights and the right of attorney-client privilege and attorney-client confidentiality bounces up against the government's interests in preventing future crime.

MR. CROSBY: When we venture into that uncharted area, the question has to come up: Is it not at all possible that an attorney might be an unwitting dupe, if you will, in a case like this, carrying what the attorney presumes to be an innocent message to someone imprisoned, only to find out later that perhaps it was something that was coded or understood to mean something else?

MR. MULLER: That is absolutely possible. And I think that is an especially great risk in a case where the messages that are being communicated are in a language that is not the lawyer's native language. According to the government's allegations - and I am just flipping through the complaint right now - the charge against the lawyer is that she was present and permitted a person from the outside to communicate directly to the Sheik communications about whether to comply with a cease-fire demand that Hosni Mubarak, the leader of Egypt, had requested after a serious attack against tourists in Egypt back in 1998, I believe it was.

So the allegation is that - and I am reading actually now from the complaint - she allowed the interpreter to read letters from the outside, and others, regarding the Islamic Group matters and to conduct a discussion with the Sheik regarding whether the Islamic Group should continue to comply with a cease-fire that had been supported by factions within the Group since 1998. Because these discussions violated the prison's rules, Stewart, the lawyer, took affirmative steps to conceal those discussions from prison guards.

So it sounds as though they have evidence not simply that she was present, but that she knew that what was being communicated was impermissible, and that they are going to prove that from some steps that she took to make sure that nobody at the prison knew that that's what was being said.

HOST: Legal analyst Eric Muller is law professor at the University of North Carolina. He spoke to V-O-A News Now's Tom Crosby.

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